Seven years ago, I predicted that the era of push advertising was over. With GDPR on the horizon, Zuckerberg testifying in Congress and Facebook users questioning their loyalty, the turning point seems closer than ever.

For you, like most consumers, the act of searching, using a third-party plugin or signing up on a site to buy products or read news might be a no-brainer. But the simple truth is some of those forms you fill out can further cement the sale of your soul to the devil and introduce the ubiquitous use of your data in ways you may not want or understand.

The cookies inserted in your browser can send your data to a common pool for anyone who can afford to bid on you so they can target you with tons of ads. Try an experiment: Erase the cookies from your browser and wait a few minutes. The malicious ones all come back, sometimes before your eyes. Persistent cookies sound shady because they are. And it’s happening despite the fact that respawning cookies is frowned upon in most cases by the FTC and DAA.

If you could translate some of the gibberish, you’d see that some of those deceitful publishers and advertisers even admit wrongdoing in the fine print buried deep in the terms and conditions of their websites, which is an inadequate practice against consumers.

For years, the advertising industry’s bad actors have been getting away with this behavior. As a result, consumers are overwhelmed and wary of advertisements that are chasing them everywhere, and advertisers waste 60% of their advertising dollars. But now, the EU is choosing to crack down on iniquitous practices in its new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines, which will make this ubiquitous form of advertising impossible. With it, EU users regain control over their data by obtaining the right to access their data, object to data processing and the right to be "forgotten."

As of May 2018, the GDPR is set to not only impact European data security but also many businesses around the world.